As someone else said, the real answer is that this is a comic.
We don't really know from the OP whether they have been together for an hour, day, week, month, or even year (and he just never found the hoodies box yet?). Irl women are stigmatized with "slut shaming" for having multiple partners, and while men get stigmatized too this is not one of those ways. So irl she might have kept it from him until she was sure that he was mature enough to handle the truth. Although she could have also used it as a test - if he were a toxic masculinity believer, better for her to know the truth right away and get far away from him?
So there's deep stuff contextually related to this... but this is a newspaper comic community, so it is unclear how deep most people really wanted to get into the deep analysis of its backstory, unlike e.g. political memes where that is more the point.
I think this is the line yeah. Number of sexual partners, whatever; but regressive attitude toward sex, ehhh, we probably aren't going to have a good time
Although I'm way beyond dating other people, so it's all academic to me now
Not certain it's slut shaming so much as addressing lying. She told him 3 guys, when the mountain of stolen sweaters, and her profuse sweating implies it was more than three.
I don't care about body count and I'm uncertain if the author does, but this joke is still funny if you don't care about body count.
Except for the little thing that the slut shaming was done earlier. When he asked her what her body count was. That's when the slut shaming happened and she avoided the repression by lying.
Or maybe I just don't get the joke. PS: Maybe she's a shoplifter?
That's not slut shaming. If he reacted negatively to her number(being too high) or stated something of similar effect. None of which is shown. Asking for information is slut shaming.
The character in the comic does not look neutral about the discrepancy in numbers. Would the comic work if the evidence was that they had slept with 0 other people?
Seems pretty cut and dry to me that the comic is piggy backing on the culture of slut shaming. It's not the entire punchline, but it's in there
The character is not neutral about the discrepancy in numbers because there's a discrepancy in numbers. I'd be a bit bothered if my SO lied to me about things too, especially such a large discrepancy that its obvious they're lying vs were accidentally wrong/forgot.
"honey you said you bought 1 car, why are there 5 new cars in the driveway?" Of course they'll be made about the discrepancy in number of cars because its not the agreed upon number.
Tell me how you would make the joke with 0 other people slept with?
It obviously isn't cut and dry, most people are fine with the joke.
Right because it's irresponsible to buy 5 cars. It's not that 5 != 1 that's the value judgement. Yes most people are fine with the joke. I wasn't claiming they weren't.
Idk, in some circles, especially if you claim to be a prestigious killer, you have to be accurate about your body count. In some cases they might ask for proof.